12 Rules for Life

I try to read every book given to me by a friend so I suffered through this one. All in all it was better than I expected. Most of it is decent advice even if his justifications for it are dumb sometimes.

Peterson needs an editor, every chapter is 2-3x longer than it should be with entire sections that don't really relate to the point he's trying to make.

Strawman after strawman which is hilarious because at one point he talks about not building up a strawman. Also jesus christ this guy is a hypocrite.

Rule 11: don't bother children skateboarding, starts off pretty reasonable then he goes into a 20+ page tangent about how communism and women's studies are bad. And no, he doesn't really ever tie it back to the theme of the chapter/book.

He quoted Mein Kampf in the context of people accepting the Big Lie easier than small tiny lies... I'm too lazy to look up the context for that quote but I'm pretty sure I don't need to. Talk about a bold choice lmao...

My favorite anecdote is the one about his daughter being in pain from RA. Her doctor doesn't want to put her on opiates because of risk of addiction. Peterson says doctor's don't know everything and doctor shops till he finds one that'll give her opiates. She's eventually zonked out on oxycontin and slurring her words all the time. Peterson buys this daughter a motorcycle. She eventually gets off the opiates after going through a very long withdrawal and says life was miserable that way and she'd rather be in pain. Great job Dr. Peterson you're right, doctor's don't know everything... Father of the year right there.

Overall the book makes a lot more sense when you realize he was strung out on benzos when he wrote it.

Jeg ville lese 12 Rules for å gjøre meg opp en egen mening, Peterson får skryt og kjeft fra de forskjelligste kanter, og kritikken om at han er en filosof for Alt-Right krevde av meg at jeg måtte sette meg inn i hva han faktisk står for.
Saken er at Jordan Peterson først og fremst er psykolog, og i de kapitlene (eller reglene) som bygger på hans hovedkompetanse, så er det svært mye bra. Det er mer enn en selvhjelpsbok, med forankring i gode historier og grundige kunnskaper. Men med en gang han trer inn i det politiske, blir kritikken fra venstresiden og fra feministene relevante: Kritikken mot feminismen og det venstrevridde (i hans øyne) akademia oppleves som mildt sagt problematiske og kaster mørke skygger over resten.

Etter å ha lest boken tar jeg avstand fra de som mener at han har en protagonist for Alt-Right, men ser at de som vil kan lese noen av reglene hans i den retning. Jeg tror derimot at det som utfordrer folk - meg også - er at han tar et ganske så solid tak i de mørkere sidene ved livet, og våger å si det samme som Paulus gjør i Romerbrevet: "Det gode som jeg vil gjør jeg ikke, og det onde som jeg ikke vil gjør jeg". Å stirre mørket inn i øynene er ganske smertefullt, og humanister vil ha problemer med å svelge det fordi det ikke passer inn i et (for) positivistisk verdensbilde. Løp og les? Nei, men du kaster ikke bort tiden heller. Men du må tåle at han kan være litt moralistisk av og til, og at han skriver mange flere ord enn det han hadde trengt.

I don't think I can add much to this article (www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve) so you can skip the rest of the comment and just read that. Also, this book is full of obvious and hidden misogyny, racism, and general intolerance of others which a lot of people mentioned in their reviews.
This book is all over the place and most of the time he is just ranting. The rules mentioned are very generic and a lot of times, the examples and actual specific statements (individual sentences that he wants the reader to accept as fact) are mostly irrelevant. There are a lot of contradictions. Admittedly, I read the book with a negative bias and my goal was to understand his general appeal to public (the subsection of public which finds him appealing). I expected some sort of coherent conservative argument which I might disagree with but I can listen to the supporting arguments and consider them based on their merit. What I didn't expect to get was the lazy half-arguments and illogical rants. His main arguments, against all progressive ideas, is how he hates them and they are just wrong and how he had this friend who thought like that and he was wrong. Given his academic background I expected to get some sort of a logical argument, but the only thing in this book is his hatred of others and his attempt to overcome his insecurities by admiring himself and saying how everyone in his examples was wrong and he saved the day (like how a child's parents couldn't control their child but he shook the child and that made the child a better person!). I guess it is a self help book because it will help the author.
(Also This might not be true, but I felt in the last chapter that he uses his family's experience of pain for emotional manipulation of the readers)
Finally, I am not a Freudian psychoanalyst but I think psych0analyzing this text will be a fun exercise for someone who is interested.

I'm sort of new to the whole "sensation" that is Jordan Peterson, initially discovering him not through his lectures on political correctness and C-16, or his Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman. Instead, I found him through his podcast via Quillette's Twitter feed, where he interviewed its founder Claire Lehmann and his later appearance on Russell Brand's Under the Skin podcast and saw him as more of a Zaphod Beeblebrox as in "He's just this guy, you know," than someone from the alt-right.

Still, this book could be so much better...

The Rules themselves have some practicality about them, but Peterson's approach to some of them leave a lot to be desired. Some Rules are more tightly written than others, especially "Set Your House in Perfect Order Before You Criticize the World". Other Rules, not so much. Peterson meanders elsewhere, wandering onto beaches into lobster hierarchies before going into an anecdote about building birdhouses in his childhood. Sometimes, it's stories from Genesis, Crime and Punishment, or The Gulag Archipelago that add additional, unnecessary weight to each "Rule", detracting from its morality. He does eventually make his connections; weak ones, but they're there. Mostly.

Rule #11, "Don't Bother Children While They're Skateboarding", suffers the most from Peterson's ramblings as it goes from the idea that people want to learn by experiencing danger first hand, whether cognitive or creative, to a rant about what feminism hath wrought according to him. Then, he decides that spending more time on the Communist regimes of the 20th Century shortly after is a good way of padding pages or an extra hour to an audiobook. The latter actually has this rule splayed out into two chapters. Which sucks, because the idea behind the Rule is brilliant, much like most of the others.

In his defense, Peterson's an academic and his prose does reflect that to a degree. However, much like Russell Brand in Recovery or ironically Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto, he tries to maintain a vernacular that an audience, unfamiliar with academia, can understand. It shows that Peterson does care about what he believes: "Life is suffering. It's full of malevolence.", "Clean up your room", "Clean up your damn life", etc.

Anyone else who reads 12 Rules for Life might not see this though, political biases notwithstanding. This album by Akira The Don condenses these Rules and ultimately strengthens them into something easily digestible if you're interested in what Peterson's talking about, but don't want to spend fifteen hours or more listening to (or reading) him go through biblical stories or wander through the Soviet Union for that matter. Then again, the success of Peterson and ultimately 12 Rules for Life allowed for that album to exist in the first place.

TLDR: Practical advice gets lost in prose to the point that Peterson undermines himself. Other options are available.